About

Plain Paper Concepts was created by Brandon Bohling and Bill Draven as a way to share their knowledge and experiences. Expect to read about all sorts of technology topics with an emphasis on various architectures. Our intention is not to publish daily writings, rather longer, more detailed articles.

Brandon Bohling and Bill Draven have been working together for many years. Often they are accused of sharing the same brain; hopefully that is one, super-size brain. They have traveled the globe educating and evangelizing their experience as Enterprise Architects and Developers. Below are some highlights…

Selected Experiences

California Department of Transportation, State of California
EA + SOA + Education

Currently engaged to establish an EA practice resulting in a vision/strategy, reference models (based on Federal Enterprise Architecture Framework) in support of the vision and strategy, reference architectures (Business, Data, Application, and Technical), and reference implementations.

Department of Technology Services, State of California
SOA + .NET + Education + IBM Product Suite

Developed and implemented SOA infrastructure for DTS SOA Pilot. Responsibilities include development of As-Is and To-Be architecture, Vendor evaluation use cases, IBM WebSphere Message Broker (WMB) IBM WebSphere Repository/Registry (WSRR) configuration, Mock (.NET) Services, Regression/Load and Stress test script/plans with accompanying Knowledge Transfer.

Intel Corporation
EA + SOA + Web Services + Education

Developed a flexible, service-based architecture for Intel that is vendor agnostic and can freely expand and contract without impacting service consumers. Architecture includes many capabilities such as virtualized endpoints, intermediaries, security, repository/registry, load balancing, protocol switching, transformation, and routing to name a few. Provided training on SO* concepts with an audience ranging from developers to executive staff members. Leveraged many methodologies/frameworks: Agile, XP, SCRUM, TOGAF, WSSR.

Intel Corporation
SOA + Web Services + .NET + Education

Developed a .NET-based (C#) application architecture framework that provided key capabilities so developers could focus on business logic and not have to worry about coding security, logging, caching, etc. Solutions built with the framework were service-based ready to integrate with a service-oriented infrastructure. Created training material for a 2-day and introduction class for application architecture that focused on the developed framework. Led to over 100 teaching hours worldwide at Intel campuses. Designed a C# web service leveraging a new Web service specification, SOAP Message Transmission Optimization Mechanism, which handled transfer of large files (4+ GB) which was patented.

California Public Employees Retirement System, Health Benefits System
Distributed Systems + Development

Primary responsibilities included migration of mainframe based CalPERS health benefits system to client server using Forte. Served as the object-modeler and developer.

Foundation Health Systems (Now HealthNet)
Distributed Systems + Development + Imaging + Workflow

Lead developer of client front-end to CICS/DB2 backend. Objective was to marry a Filenet imaging system with legacy CICS adjudication system with custom workflow engine and end-user desktop rich client.

Technical Experts

  • Former Members, Microsoft Patterns and Practices Customer Advisory Board
  • Former Members, BEA Enterprise Architect Advisory Board
  • Speakers to BEA SOA Masters, SAP and Tibco on use of schema agnostic service bus architectures
  • Speakers at VSLive 2005 on importance of application blocks and frameworks
  • Numerous customer engagements supporting of Intel Sales force on Intel IT philosophy around SOA
  • Reviewers of “SOA Design Patterns” by Thomas Erl
  • Reviewers of “SOA: Principles of Service Design” by Thomas Erl
  • Reviewers of “Improving .NET Application Performance and Scalability” by Microsoft Patterns and Practices
  • Co-authored “Professional ASP.NET Web Services” book

What Else?

Whenever Bill and Brandon get free cycles they also enjoy working on iPhone apps, web design/development, photography, and GPS-related work. If you care to learn more about us check out our websites: Bill Draven and Brandon Bohling.